A buddy and namesake of mine has a father who is a literature scholar. He wrote his thesis on absurdist drama, Beckett and Ionesco, that sort of thing. This influenced his son’s vocabulary. Once about 1970, when the scholar was out on a walk with his little boy in a stroller, they passed a large tractor and a group of people. The boy was greatly impressed by the tractor, pointed to it and exclaimed, “Absurd tractor!”. The bystanders stared in amazement.

When I was an engineering student, we were given an excellent lecture by a mechanical engineer who explained how inherently unsafe the traditional farm tractor is. The way he explained it, it’s like if you hate farmers and want to invent a device to kill as many of them as possible, you design the farm tractor.

No cab to protect the driver, just a little seat to perch on, two massive drive wheels on the back with very low gearing and a huge amount of torque, and a very hot exhaust pipe sticking up out of the engine compartment at the front. You apply too much power when the tractor is not pulling a piece of heavy farm equipment, especially when you are going uphill, and the tractor does a back flip, with the farmer underneath – he is either crushed by the tractor, or ends up pinned under the tractor in contact with the exhaust pipe. Or both.

Absurd design? From a safety point of view, yes, unless you can give lectures to all farmers about how to drive their tractors safely – in Australia, you don’t need any kind of licence to drive a tractor off public roads. From a utility and cost point of view, it’s fine, as long as you have an over-abundant supply of farmers – which is usually the case when a farmer has more than one son.